If, when you die, you die a happy man, then from that point on, there really is no more you, not a shred of you. You are truly gone. There’s no possibility whatsoever that you might somehow, someday, come back, in one form or another, in this world or another. In other words, when someone dies a happy man, the person has died forever.
Now why do I say that? Why, the reason is simple, the logic is straightforward, and it’s something even a fool can grasp.
Start with “happy man.” A person who’s happy, or who has achieved happiness, is a person who has nothing left to fulfill, has no grudge against anyone, no regrets, no revenge yet to take on the person who wronged him. So when such a person dies, he dies with no regrets, since everything he ever wanted to get, he’s gotten; everything he ever wished for has come true; and everything he ever hoped for, planned to do, or wanted to achieve has come to pass.
By the way, it’d be bad logic and idiocy to say, “Ah, but everyone agrees that happiness is a good thing, so what makes you think a happy man is willing to die without hoping to come back and have more of it?”
This reply to what I said arises from a confusion: if a dying happy man hopes to come back, or go somewhere else, to have more of the happiness he has had in this world, then that wish, or hope, or dream, call it whatever you want, is a wish unfulfilled. And a person with a wish he wants fulfilled, but that has not been fulfilled, cannot be a happy man.
So there!
I don’t want to die a happy man.
I want to die a 窦娥, someone who endured egregious and gut-wrenching wrongs at the hands of some people, but the wrongs, at the moment of my death, have not been corrected and the wrongdoers have not been brought to justice and punished. I want to die this way, die with the awareness that I was wronged and the wrongdoers have gone unpunished, because when I die knowing all this, I’m dying a “wronged soul,” or yuan hun (冤魂), as the Chinese people say. I die with my eyes open, or si bu ming mu (死不瞑目), another wonderful Chinese saying. And my wronged soul might rise to Heaven, since Heaven has eyes (上天有眼), and I sure will come back to haunt the family of the person who wronged me, and they will never have peace.
I wish to die a Webster, so that every time someone says stuff like, “Irregardless of who’s phone that is, your going to loose it if you don’t screen it’s texts for bad grammar like i did,” or if they talk stuff such as, “ngl its literally giving low-key main character energy tbh, so we need to synergize and double-click on that low-hanging fruit fr fr,” I get to “turn in my grave,” which is still far better than just plain dead, like no movin’ and stuff you know what I mean.
I wish to die a Newton, or, if I can’t get that, I’ll take Einstein, so that I get to roll over in my grave when some YouTuber spreads pseudoscience and says that if the Earth is spinning at 1,000 miles per hour, an airplane shouldn’t even need to fly to reach its destination. It should just hover in the air for a few hours and let the ground move underneath it until the target city arrives!
And I get to roll over some more when someone talks about an infinite-energy hack, saying, “I figured out a free energy hack. If you take a portable power bank, plug a phone charger into it, and then plug that same charger cable right back into the power bank’s input port, it will charge itself forever and create infinite electricity.”
If I die, I wish to die a Charles Darwin.
Why do I want to die a Darwin? Why, for the same reason! If I die this way, I get to be sick to my stomach every time the conspirators try their hands at undermining my theory of evolution.
First, there are those who argue against me, saying that if humans evolved from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys around today? Plus, if evolution is real, why hasn’t my pet dog evolved wings yet so it can fly? And you people also say that, since I called my account of evolution the “theory of evolution,” therefore, even by Darwin’s own admission, it’s a mere theory, and a theory is not science.
Imagine having to lie there and listen to that for eternity.
But at least I’d still be there.
So if you want my advice on the matter of immortality, do not die a happy man!
